Monday, September 20, 2010

Pissing in the Wind

As my buddy Chuck Baudelaire says at the top of this page, "You have to be always drunk.... Wine, poetry, or virtue as you wish. But be drunk." He's talking about passion, finding it and following it where it leads you. Less elegantly put, life is about getting off on something. If you're not turning on, you're shutting down. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, if you're not busy being born, you're busy dying. Life, done right, should be intoxicating on a daily basis.

Yet there are an awful lot of sober people in this world. Some are just total abstainers; they won't even sip from Baudelaire's cup. Maybe they drank deeply in their earlier years but have gone on the wagon now that they're "grown up" (as if "grown" implies "done growing"). Maybe nobody ever taught them to drink - sobriety of the soul often runs in families. Sad, dutiful little families. Or maybe someone sold them on the supposed benefits of "moderation in all things," and they've simply excluded the possibility of drunkenness from their world view. They consume life in appropriate amounts, drinking sufficiently but not deeply, and certainly not enough to ever blow over the limit.

There is little to recommend sobriety or its practitioners.

Then there's me. I wholeheartedly support drunkenness of the Baudelairian sort (as well as other sorts). But I'm not very good at achieving it. I find myself constantly breaking the cardinal rule of a passionate life, which interestingly enough is the same as the cardinal rule of drinking alcohol: Don't mix your drinks.

Most of us know it, and many of us have learned it the hard way: When you start with vodka, stick with vodka. Don't switch to whisky, or gin, or God forbid, beer. If you do, you compromise your buzz, not to mention the contents of your stomach. For most of us, mixing drinks is just pissing in the wind.

I know that. Yet when it comes to pursuing the intoxication of a passionate life, I'm my own worst enemy: slamming a shot of this, a shot of that, abusing the opportunity for a truly great buzz for the sake of variety. I want to write great words; I want to sew beautiful clothes; I want to sculpt my body to its best shape and size; I want to finish tiling that damn shower. Of course, none of it ever gets done, or enjoyed, to my satisfaction, and whatever I'm doing, I'm also glancing sidelong at what I'm not doing and harboring regrets over the priorities I've chosen. I'm pissing in the wind.

What's the solution? Apart from a Time Turner, a la Harry Potter, the options are limited. Do less; make hard choices; flame out spectacularly; give up. These options are, respectively, weak, boring, dangerous, and unacceptable. So where do I go from here? The answer, I think, is simply to go. All epic benders start with a single sip. And if life isn't meant to be an epic bender, then I don't know what is. Drink deeply, and the niggling details and practical obstacles to doing so become pleasantly fuzzy. It takes some courage to start, but after a while the courage to continue wells up spontaneously. That's how it goes with alcohol, at least; why not with life?

So when it comes to the things that make me drunk with passion, I'm going to give this a try: Stop thinking and start drinking. I think Charlie Baudelaire would approve.